


de survivre à l'absence

by tendresettroubles



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Post-Barricade
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-18
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:15:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27331060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tendresettroubles/pseuds/tendresettroubles
Summary: Grantaire and Enjolras are the only two survivors of the barricade that claimed their friends' lives. To escape the National Guard, Enjolras flees south to his childhood home, and takes all his guilt, grief and doubts with him.
Relationships: Enjolras/Grantaire (Les Misérables)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 31
Collections: Enjoltaire Games 2020





	de survivre à l'absence

**Author's Note:**

> hello!! this is my entry for the [enjoltaire games 2020](https://enjoltairegames.tumblr.com/)! this was really fun to write despite the harrowing last sprint to meet the deadline (which is entirely my fault and i should be dubbed master procrastinator) - and i hope you enjoy reading this as much as i did writing it! 
> 
> as you probably know by now, the theme for this year is **home** and you can find my team, my prompt and the voting form in the end notes. 
> 
> also, big thanks to our endlessly wonderful mod, muse, and my tirelessly talented beta, alias tractopelle. love you both. thank u.

Enjolras stared at the letter on his desk. It was a plain, cream-coloured envelope with his name and address scribbled on the front in a script that was more familiar to him than he would have liked to admit. The l of his first name threatened to fly off the page and an ink stain had spread on the E of his last, proof of either a hasty or heedless hand. Or perhaps it was both. Enjolras looked at it pensively, free of any desire to read it. He had been surprised to find the letter by his plate in the morning: every person who knew his address was either in this house or dead on Parisian cobblestones— every person, but one. This would have made the deduction rather easy had the handwriting not already given its author away; Grantaire had never been a master calligrapher, and this was doubtlessly one of his finer productions. 

He didn’t know what Grantaire could possibly have written him, but he was in no hurry to find out. He had no schedule, no duties, no meetings to plan, no one to organise. It all felt rather empty but, deep down, he knew he was terrified of unsealing that letter only to be thrown back to rue de la Chanvrerie, right between the barricade and the Corinth.

It wasn’t as though he hadn’t been thinking about it. In fact, that day was all he had been able to think of since his arrival in Hauterives almost three weeks prior; it followed him around like an insistent ghost, day and night. Enjolras knew the letter would turn that ghost into flesh and bones; it would be proof that those flashes that plagued him were more than some sinister images conjured up by his troubled, tired mind. It would prove that they were real, and that nothing Enjolras could do would undo it all. He had led his friends to their deaths and escaped it himself. It was difficult to fathom a worse betrayal than that. 

Maybe Grantaire had written to apologise for saving his life. Surely Enjolras would have died the martyr’s death he had prepared himself for had Grantaire not been there to whisk him out the back of the Corinth through a hidden trapdoor. It had escaped Enjolras’ notice despite his frequent patronage of the place; thankfully, this meant that the National Guard was unlikely to notice it, too, and they hadn't. And so they had ran, and ran, until their legs had refused to take them any farther. 

Enjolras’ eyes had stung, his legs wobbling as he’d searched for a breath to ask Grantaire why he had saved him. He had been too worn for anger, but the question had burned his lips too much for him to swallow it back down. When he had finally found the breath he was looking for, the sentence had come out sounding more like a groan than a question.

“The cause would’ve died with you,” Grantaire had replied in between pants, looking at him as he’d leaned on the wall of the narrow alley they’d found themselves in. “If you stay alive, then— then maybe they didn’t die in vain,” he’d added with a slight nod of his head in the direction they'd come from. Enjolras hadn’t really seen the sense in those words then, but he hadn’t had the strength to reply, either. 

“You need to leave,” Grantaire had said a few minutes later, when their heart rates had nearly returned to normal. He’d stared at Enjolras, who’d stared back, unmasked confusion on his features. “You’ll get caught if you stay. You were front and centre, all reds and golds” — he’d gestured at Enjolras’ blood-stained coat— “there’s no way the Guard won’t remember you.” 

Enjolras had opened his mouth to protest, but he’d closed it after realising how serious Grantaire was being. He wasn’t sure he had ever seen him like that. Grantaire’s eyes had been dark, his hair pasted to his forehead, and there hadn’t even been a hint of a smirk on his lips. It was impossible to tell whether he was drunk or not, but it hadn’t really mattered. Such a look from him was so unusual that Enjolras had found nothing more to say. 

“Do your parents still live in the Midi?” 

Enjolras had nodded slowly, his eyes focused on the street behind Grantaire. His arm had begun to sting, probably from a bullet narrowly missing him, settling for a shred of cloth and a little bit of his skin instead. He had still been trying to make sense of Grantaire’s words, but it amounted to nothing: Les Amis were dead and so was their dream of a Republic, bleeding out behind the deserted barricade. There was no salvaging any of it, no saving any of them. He’d wanted to tell Grantaire that the cause had died, that it was over, and that he should have been one of the corpses littering the cobblestones, but Grantaire had spoken before he could. 

“That’s where you should go. I know a carriage leaving Paris tomorrow, nine o’clock at Place Saint-Sulpice. Just tell him where to go. And pay him, too. He’ll like that.” 

“What about you?” was all Enjolras had been able to choke out, his voice hoarse from the smoke and the running. 

At that Grantaire had waved a dismissive hand. “This whole city is made up of people like me, they’ll have to search for a while,” he’d said wryly, and seeing that Enjolras wasn’t convinced, he’d added, “Besides, I was inside most of the time. None of them saw me, but there’s no doubt they saw you. Go home, Enjolras.” 

And Enjolras, for the first time in his life, had acquiesced to Grantaire’s words. He’d gone back to his flat that evening, had burned most of his old clothes and cut his long hair off. He didn’t have much to put in his suitcase save for a shirt, three books, and a poem Jehan had written about them all. Flowers he had drawn framed the words, almost as though they had grown from the letters he had traced on the paper. Enjolras’ heart had ached at the sight of it. Papers from meetings at the Musain were still littering his desk, dark from annotations and corrections in Combeferre’s hand, and he’d thought of burning them, just to be done with it all. Something had stopped him, though, and he’d stuffed the folder into his suitcase, too. It stung too much to burn the last mementoes of his friends. 

It hadn’t been hard to find the carriage the next morning, and before he’d known it he’d been on his way home for the first time in years. A heaviness had weighed on him, an unspeakable sadness that had kept him quiet and subdued for most of the journey. 

He’d thought of Joly, Bahorel, Feuilly, Combeferre, Courfeyrac, Bossuet, thought of Jehan’s voice and the distant yet deafening shot that had followed the poet’s last words. He’d thought of how he had betrayed them, deserted them. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t been prepared to lose them; they all knew they were going to die, but even that Enjolras had failed to do by their side. 

The anger had come soon after, washing over Enjolras as he’d sat in the rumbling southbound carriage. Why did Grantaire have to save him? Had that been his misguided way of being righteous? Worst of all, had he done it out of selfishness? Had he done it in a bout of deluded infatuation, because of the hours they had spent together on what was meant to be their very last night? 

Enjolras had shaken his head, as though to drive the memory of Grantaire’s flushed cheeks and bright eyes out of his mind. They had promised each other never to speak of that night again; they weren’t supposed to be alive to remember it, anyway. Now that he was, the best he could do is forget about it and all the implications it had. The landscape outside the carriage window had trotted by, and Enjolras had soon fallen into a restless sleep. 

He’d arrived a little less than a week later. The house looked the same as he remembered, its white, spotless facade pierced here and there by tall windows with dark green shutters. His mother had run up to him as he walked through the door, worry painted all over her features — she was visibly more concerned by his short hair than the news of a revolution, no matter how thwarted. She'd examined his face then pulled him close, running her fingers through his hair like she used to when he was a boy.

She’d pulled away to look at his face again. 

“Did the revolutionaries do this to you, Gabriel? Oh, Lord, I do hope you stayed away from there. I heard it was so awful, so many young boys died, and for what?” He’d remained still in her arms as she’d pulled him close again and he’d squeezed his eyes shut, willing the tension in his shoulders to dissipate, in vain. “Oh, Gabriel, I’m so happy you’re home. You’re safe here, you know. Come, I had Mariette clean your room.” 

She hadn’t asked him whether he knew anyone who had died; it was unfathomable to her that her son, educated as he was, could ever find himself caught up in republican matters. 

So Enjolras had given her a weak smile and retreated to his bedroom, only to come out for dinner that evening, settling into the household’s routine faster than he thought he would.

Three weeks went by that way, uneventfully, until Enjolras found the letter by his cutlery one morning in early July. And there he was. 

The more he thought about it, the more difficult it was to leave the letter unopened. Perhaps Grantaire had written him to tell him one of Les Amis had miraculously survived? Enjolras reached forward and unsealed the letter. The handwriting on the inside was no better than on the envelope, if not worse, but Enjolras hadn’t expected any different. 

_Paris, 17 June 1832._

_I didn’t deserve to be the one to survive this, Gabriel. We both know that. Do not make the mistake of thinking my absence was a symptom of fear, cowardice or some godforsaken shortage of solidarity. Every day I wish I had taken one of their places. Any one of them. Doubtlessly Joly would have dealt with this better than I am, perhaps he should have been the one to pull you out of that street. I finish my glass in hopes that, at the bottom of it, I’ll find the reason why it isn’t Bossuet’s heart beating instead of mine. I never find it. I ask myself a thousand questions, I tell myself a thousand lies, and I believe none of them._

_If you read this, then you are home; I would like to believe this means you are safe, too. Cherish your family._

_The glass is empty, old friend, and I must go to sleep. It is a luxury I cannot afford to refuse when it comes knocking, for it seldom does._

_Yours,_

_R_

Enjolras read the letter again, running his thumb on the ink as his eyes skipped across the page and lingered on the names scribbled on the paper by Grantaire’s uneven hand. Joly and Bossuet had been his closest friends, Enjolras knew. It seemed as though the level-headedness he had displayed on that fateful day didn’t stick around long, and it pained Enjolras to realise that Grantaire had undoubtedly fallen apart as soon as he had left Paris. It was difficult to imagine him bereft, but easy to know what he would do when faced with such overwhelming grief. He just hoped Grantaire wouldn't go too far.

  
⁂

Enjolras found himself wandering through the hallways during the day, slowly coming to realise that while nothing about the house had changed, something felt different. The numerous paintings and tapestries remained in the same spots they did when he was a child, dutifully hanging from their assigned nails, but they looked dimmer, almost as though someone had thrown a veil over them, obscuring the brightness and life from Enjolras' memories of them.

He came to a stop in front of the portrait of a middle-aged man he used to be terrified of, a nobleman from the past century whose name had already been lost to time. The figure in the painting had always seemed imposing to young Enjolras, one of his hands resting imperiously on his cane as his blue eyes stared forward, his gaze cold and callous. Even after his first growth spurt as a young man, the painting had made him feel small and insignificant. Yet looking at it now, Enjolras couldn’t find any of the striking grandeur he felt before. The man almost seemed pitiable. 

It wasn’t simply the painting, either. The entire house felt smaller, less grand, less luminous than he remembered. The summers here had been the best moments of Enjolras’ life; he remembered the warm afternoons spent in the garden with endless fondness. Summer was also the only season during which his father wouldn’t force him to go up to Paris once a month to “introduce him to high society”. Thinking about it now made his hair stand on end — the condescending men he had met there, the ones that made up the so-called high society were the very reason for his fight, even if he hadn’t known it at the time. These people spent their lives cushioned by His Majesty’s good favours, unable and unwilling to fathom the ravages that poverty and hardship left behind them in the city centre. 

Enjolras knew he once was one of them; accepted, comfortable, clad in itchy clothing as he snatched canapés from their silver trays. He also knew just how much he had grown since those days, and how moving to Paris had been the decision that had changed it all. 

Every Ami had taught him innumerable lessons over the years; some had been intentional — those had mostly come from Combeferre and his books— while others had been entirely accidental — a drunk Courfeyrac could find a moral to just about anything —, but Feuilly had been the one who’d taught him the most. Many long conversations with him had opened Enjolras’ mind to Paris as a city, but also and perhaps more importantly, to its people. If Paris had been Feuilly’s heart, his soul resided under every roof, in every single person living in that city. Perhaps this meant that he was, in some way, still alive. Enjolras remembered seeing him sitting at the foot of a wall, absentmindedly toying with something he hadn’t been able to see. Above him, scratched into the plaster, the inscription “ _Vivent les peuples_ ”. This was a memory Enjolras knew he would cherish for the rest of his life. The pain of it would fade over time, but Feuilly’s words would be etched in that wall for years to come. 

⁂

His younger sister Angélique visited on the sixth week. The last time Enjolras had seen her was at her wedding to a wealthy merchant’s son, a young man named Simon Morel. Angélique and Enjolras sat in a corner of the living room as their father and Simon talked of horses, horse races and other games in which those who could afford to lose liked to participate. Much to his father’s chagrin, Enjolras had never shown any interest in derbies and other entertainment of that nature, and Paris hadn’t changed that. He observed his father from time to time, finding him to be growing smaller in stature and in mind as the years passed— in that, he and the house he lived in were strikingly similar.

“Come, come, let me show you Alméria,” Mr Enjolras said suddenly to Simon, gesturing toward the open doors. “You’ll see just how strong she is. She’s won almost all of her races this season, you know.”

At that, Mrs Enjolras jumped to her feet. “It’ll be the perfect occasion to show you the rose patches I’ve been telling you about, they are divine this year. My lilies are in full bloom, too, but they would be more beautiful if it weren’t for this wretched heat,” she said, glaring at the outdoors. Simon smiled and nodded readily, casting his wife an inquisitive glance over his shoulder. It was clear they shared a deep affection for one another, and Angélique returned the smile with a light shake of her head. 

“Oh, let them be,” Mrs Enjolras said, grabbing onto Simon’s arm. “They probably have a lot of catching up to do, conspirators as they are. You should’ve seen them as kids, God help me!” She shook her head, but the smile on her face spoke of endless fondness. "Like devils, they were.” 

Enjolras felt something not unlike relief wash over him; he would finally have his sister to himself for more than a second. She’d once been the person Enjolras loved most in the entire world, the one he’d told every little thing to, and he was sure his move to Paris hadn’t changed it all. He rather hoped it had remained this way, that marriage and her new life hadn’t changed who Angélique was, even though his own studies and life in the city had changed and shaped his beliefs beyond imagination.

“You look tired,” she said, contemplating his face in search for the reason behind that exhaustion, in vain. There wasn’t any way she could guess the reasons for his sleeplessness at night, the ghosts haunting him by way of shadows on his walls and invisible bloodstains on his hands. When he did find sleep, it was of the most heavy yet restless sort; it was succumbing to exhaustion for a few moments only to be jolted awake by a nightmare. Shadows must have left some of his dreams to settle beneath his eyes; he could see them reflected in Angélique’s. 

Enjolras knew that telling his sister wasn’t a good idea, and yet for the weeks he had spent here, the only thing he had wanted was to unload the burden and tell somebody— anybody. Share the weight he had been collapsing under, even if just for a moment, and Angélique seemed like the surest person to tell. He had briefly considered writing Grantaire back, but hadn’t the right words to put on the page; everything he wanted to say Grantaire already knew. Pain, loss and grief; the trinity that always hung above him. He had almost gotten accustomed to its presence. Grantaire already knew about them, and it didn’t seem as though he dealt with them any better than Enjolras did. Besides, Grantaire wasn’t Enjolras’ confidant; that role had been Combeferre’s or Courfeyrac’s. Enjolras had only confided in Grantaire once, on a pillow, after his last effort to make sure he would leave the Earth free of regrets and what ifs on the following day.

He looked into Angélique’s blue eyes and imagined that they were children again; it felt easier that way, almost as though the subject was still a childish, ultimately harmless secret. 

“I’m not used to the quiet,” he said with a sigh, casting his eyes down. “Paris is always alive and here— I haven’t been sleeping well, is all.” Angélique nodded and smiled almost imperceptibly, her hands folded in her lap like an obedient child.

The silence hit Enjolras on his second night here — he hadn’t even tried to sleep on the first, knowing it was out of the question as soon as he walked into his room after having bid his family goodnight. The barricade was still too fresh in his mind, so was the sight of his friends’ bodies, their open, lifeless eyes staring into nothing at all, blood like grotesque war paint on their features. It had been as though the acrid smell of gunpowder was hanging around the room, and echoes of gunshots ricocheted endlessly around his skull. 

The second night had been different, a dead quiet that was somehow worse than the night before. He could hear his blood beating in his ears, feel every little creak of his joints that reminded him just how alive he was compared to his friends. One more reminder that he had gotten out painfully unscathed.

“What is it, then?” 

Enjolras blinked images of the barricade away and looked at his sister. “What?” 

“That’s been keeping you up. Something clearly is on your mind.” 

Enjolras had never been good at sleeping; Angélique knew that. This had changed briefly in Paris; some days were so busy that he would fall into bed at night and not wake until morning light filtered through his thin curtains. Those days were far gone, though. That she noticed it must have meant that he looked more tired than usual. He had become rather good at sleeping very little, but this didn’t mean he was used to stringing sleepless nights one after the other, much less when those nights involved dreams so vivid that he woke from them shaking and drenched in sweat.

“You have to promise not to tell Mother anything. Or your husband, for that matter,” he said, glancing at the open door. Secrecy wasn’t familiar to him, but here it felt necessary; he didn’t want to imagine what would happen were his parents to find out about his revolutionary convictions. Perhaps they would keep him in Hauterives for the rest of his life, and the thought of it filled him with dread. Had it been five years earlier, he would have welcomed that idea; follow in his father’s footsteps, eventually inherit the house, the money, all of it. Now it all seemed almost revolting.

A small but wicked smile appeared on Angélique’s face, the same kind of expression she used to make when she was about to be told a secret as a child. She had always been unusually good at keeping them. “Promise.” 

Enjolras took a deep breath and started speaking, unaware of the smile falling off his sister’s face as the words escaped his mouth. Instead he stared at the rug under their feet without really seeing it. The patterns of the woven fabric looked like the crisscross of the table and chair legs that they piled up rue de la Chanvrerie, well before they realised that Paris had deserted them. 

“I was at the barricades,” he said, feeling his insides twist into a knot. He did his best to keep his voice level, to stay as detached as he could. Barricade. Barricade. He had repeated the word in his mind so many times in the past weeks that it almost felt fabricated, like it was just one letter following the other, empty of all meaning. “I was one of the students Father read about in the paper. The ones that are so terrifying to Mother.” He paused for a beat, not knowing whether he was giving Angélique time to process the information or if he needed it for himself. He hadn’t said any of that out loud before. He had been steeping in the hopes of a revolution for so long that it had become his life, an absolute truth that needed no stating; it simply was. Everyone around him understood that, everyone was living in the same reality. 

In fact, Grantaire was the only one who, amidst the choruses of approval from the Musain’s backroom, would question everything Enjolras said, and even then, most of the time, it was simply for the sake of doing it. For the thrill of talking back, the rush of the argument. Grantaire had always been bright, but he was most awful at putting that intelligence to good use; it was as though he was determined to ruin himself, and to have fun on the way there. For what it was worth, Enjolras did treasure Grantaire’s inputs. As scattered and frustrating as they might have been in form, they often carried insight that had clearly been mulled over again and again, and they had helped, whether Enjolras was ready to acknowledge it or not. 

And so he explained it all, from the early days distributing tracts Place du Château-d’Eau, to their multiplying meetings in cafés, the friendships he’d made and the bonds he’d forged; how he had discovered that revolution was human before it was anything else. The only things he kept to himself were Les Amis’ names and that evening with Grantaire, the day before the barricades: the former felt like a memory best kept to himself and the latter, one he was afraid of remembering. 

“There must be a way to do this without spilling so much blood,” Angélique murmured after Enjolras fell silent. “And you know we’ve had worse rulers than Louis-Philippe.” 

“There has been worse,” Enjolras conceded. “But this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t strive for better, that we shouldn’t be able to choose who’ll lead us or fight for what we believe is right, without sacrificing anybody’s lives. We fight upon barricades today so that the ones coming after won’t have to.” 

Angélique stared at him. There was a look in her eyes that he had never seen before, an uncomfortable blend of worry and pity. “You _die_ upon barricades today, Gabriel. Your friends paid the price for something that might never be, for an idea, for an ideal. You throw away your lives, mindless of the people around you. Imagine how Mother would be if you had died there. You would have destroyed her.” 

Enjolras opened his mouth to speak, but she went on before he could say a word. 

“Your friends bled into the ground and nothing has changed. Was it worth it? Was it worth it to see these things that’ll haunt you for the rest of your life, knowing you could have avoided it all? The King is still King. We are too small to talk to the powers that be, so let them be.” 

The door opened once more and their parents, followed by Simon, walked back into the room as Angélique’s words faded into silence. All three were laughing about something, and Enjolras’ hands curled into fists as he stood up from the chair he had been sitting in. His sister’s words had felt like a slap across the face and a stab in the gut at the same time; all he could think about was the anger gnawing furiously at his insides. She didn’t understand what he was trying to do, didn’t know that he had been wracked with sorrow and guilt over the loss of those people he had held dear. None of them did, he realised as he looked as his parents and their son-in-law. They were in a comfortable home, never having to worry about anything other than whether the weather would allow for an afternoon promenade. Nothing about the state of things was unbearable to them, and he had been like that, too, once. He realised with a jolt that this wasn’t what he wanted to become. 

Enjolras returned to his room and sat at his desk for a moment, right up until everything he was feeling, everything he had kept bottled up for weeks on end started bubbling at the surface, Angélique's words like a fresh wound in his mind. When it inevitably started spilling over, he grabbed pen and paper and started writing everything that came to him. His sister, his family, what his life had become once he had come back. How he was afraid of his faith burning out if he stayed away from Paris for too long. The city had fed his desire for change for so long, steadily providing him with conviction and friendship, that it was strange to be so far from it. It was only after he was done, his fingers stained black with ink and his mind and body thoroughly drained, that he sat back and realised that all he had written had been addressed to Grantaire. There was no name, no introductory phrase, but he knew it in his bones. Every word he had written down he could have spoken to Grantaire out loud; in fact, he almost ached to. He looked at the darkened pages, looked at his own hesitations and the smudges on the paper, the proofs of resentment and anger and remorse, and wondered whether to send it. Perhaps it would prove to be cathartic. 

He mulled over it for a while, until the anger took a backseat and exhaustion washed over him instead. His words on the paper now seemed misshapen, awkward, his sentences lame and disjointed. He couldn't find it in himself to rework them, much less put them in an envelope, so he gave up on sending it. Grantaire would have to wait.

⁂

  
Another letter arrived on an unbearably hot August morning. This time, Enjolras didn’t tiptoe around it. He immediately excused himself from the breakfast table and returned to his room to unseal the envelope. He was surprised that Grantaire had written again despite the lack of response the first time around, but not only did the arrival of something that changed from his mundane routine feel endlessly thrilling; it also meant that Grantaire was still in a state to write. 

_Paris, 8 August 1832_

_Gabriel,_

_I write to you with a piece of good news among all this uncertainty: Pontmercy is alive. I would not do him the disrespect of saying I wish someone else had had his luck, but I do. I suppose we will have to make do._  
_I saw students in a café the other day; a few of them wore their cockade just like young Gavroche used to. There might just be some hope left yet._

_It has been difficult to come to terms with how much my heart aches knowing how far you are, and it isn’t easy to trick it into believing otherwise; in truth, I must have a compass instead of a heart. I hope you are safe and well. I find myself thinking of your mouth, your eyes, of your skin. I had a taste of heaven that night and was enough of a fool to let it go. I have been trying to find my way back to these gates ever since._

_Yours most faithfully,_

_R_

  
Enjolras’ heart started hammering against his ribcage uncontrollably as he read. Where Grantaire’s first letter had been proof of the bloodshed at the barricade and had brought more guilt than Enjolras knew what to do with, his second instilled him with newfound hope and irrational longing— for Paris and its streets, for the flat he had come to call his, for his friends’ memory that he intended to honour in every move he made in their fight, and for Grantaire, too, and the flicker of mischief so often in his eyes.

There were new ones. More young men with fire burning in their hearts and dreams of a better future filling their heads. Surely they were still green, but time and all those papers from Combeferre would change that, and for a moment Enjolras was grateful for his own sentimentality. Had he burned them, they would have had to start over. But now, these new boys would learn, and grow, and go further than Les Amis had. Grantaire was right; maybe there was some hope left yet. Enjolras thought of Les Amis again, and the notion of their unwavering support and conviction heartened him further. Perhaps it simply hadn’t been their time, but unlike Angélique believed, nothing had been in vain. Every step that they took in the right direction, no matter how arduous, remained one more step. Making peace with his own survival would take time— he knew that. Enjolras also knew, reading over the letter again and taking in the lonely R scrawled at the bottom of the page, that not only did his beliefs reside in the capital, but someone who waited for him there did, too. 

⁂

  
_Hauterives, 15 August 1832_

_Dear Aurèle,_

_Please forgive me for the belated reply; I am leaving today. I have come to realise that despite all the fond childhood memories and safety my family home has to offer, my place is no longer here. Paris is where I belong, heart and soul, and if it means the police find me, so be it. I do hope you will join me once again, for I sorely lack a companion beside whom I can stand— and I aspire for that person to be you, if so is your desire. Perhaps the clouds might part and reveal the heavens once again._

Enjolras hesitated, his hand hovering over the page as he glanced at Grantaire’s two letters on the desk by him. They looked as though they had been waiting. Enjolras had run out of ink, but more importantly he wasn’t quite sure how to end the letter. After a while, he dipped the pen in the inkwell again, and set it down on the paper decisively. 

_Yours,_

_Gabriel_

**Author's Note:**

>  **Team:** Enjolras  
>  **Theme:** Home  
>  **Prompt:** T7. If you go anywhere, even paradise, you will miss your home. – Malala Yousafzai


End file.
